Life

Frank Samperi was born in Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

, New York, the illegitimate child of an Italian mother who died when he was 11. After two years in an orphanage, he was brought up by aunts. At 20 he enlisted and was sent to fight in the Korean war

Korean War

The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...

 where he eventually suffered a nervous breakdown due to battlefield trauma and was honorably discharged. He then returned to Brooklyn, where he began writing the poems of his first collection, Song Book. After attending a writing workshop he met the poet Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...

, who became an early mentor and also introduced him to Cid Corman

Cid Corman

Cid Corman was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.-Early life and writing:...

. Having married, Samperi took a teaching position in Japan in 1964. There the connection with Corman was renewed and resulted in his poems being championed in Origin (magazine)

Origin (magazine)

Origin magazine, is an American poetry magazine that was founded in 1951 by Cid Corman. The magazine provided an early platform for the work of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Theodore Enslin and other important, ground-breaking poets, who collectively created an alternative to academic...

and published in limited editions from Kyoto

Kyoto

is a city in the central part of the island of Honshū, Japan. It has a population close to 1.5 million. Formerly the imperial capital of Japan, it is now the capital of Kyoto Prefecture, as well as a major part of the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto metropolitan area.-History:...

. He shortly returned to Brooklyn, completing one poetic trilogy (published between 1971-3) and working on a six-part composition titled COMPREHENSOR Viator, only parts of which were published in limited editions. In the early 1980s Samperi moved to Sun City, Arizona

Sun City, Arizona

Sun City is a census-designated place and unincorporated town in Maricopa County, Arizona, United States. The population was 38,309 at the 2000 census...

, but declining health prevented him from writing much more before his death at the age of 58. His early poetry was a luminous notation of things seen, pared down in language and form. This laid the groundwork of a religious vision based on Dante

DANTE

Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...

's Divine Comedy and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...

.

Sources

• Cid Corman: 120 letters to Frank Samperi (1972-5)http://www.oac.cdlib.org/data/13030/hc/kt587034hc/files/kt587034hc.pdf
• John Martone (ed.): Frank Samperi’s Lamentations, Italian Americana 2 (2003): 177—184. Excerpts from the diary kept from 1963 to 1965 by Samperi 'contribute to a better understanding of his poetry, especially his vision of a culture based on individual difference, not on economic or political hierarchies.'
• O'Leary, Peter: Reversion and the Turning Thither: Writing Religious Poetry and the Case of Frank Samperi, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture - Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2004, pp. 54–85.
• J. Townsend: Spiritual Man, Modern Man - The Poetics of Frank Samperi, Jacket 36 (Late 2008) http://jacketmagazine.com/36/townsend-samperi.shtml

External links

• A blog by the poet's daughter Claudia This contains text from his journal, photographs, letters and holograph poems.